Sri Lanka’s defeated Prime Minister, Ranil Wickramasinghe, was unwise to announce that the triumph of his President Chandrika Kumaratunga’s rival party at the polls was going to be bad for peace. It would seem that he was allowing the bitter feelings that exist between him and the president to overcome his normal instinct for statesmanship.
Under Wickramasinghe, the peace process with the Tamils made real progress. The president’s United People’s Freedom Alliance (UPFA) has all along been skeptical of the negotiations. The party has also attracted hard-liners, particularly in the military, who despite the experience of 22 years of bitter insurrection, are still wedded to the notion that the Tamils can be defeated once and for all in battle. The UPFA is, however, eight seats short of an outright majority in the new Parliament and will need to govern in coalition. The outgoing premier believes that working with others will undermine the effectiveness of the new government in negotiating with the Tamils. This view is a trifle ingenuous. It may just as well cause the UPFA to rein in its more hard-line members who want to return to confrontation. The plain fact is that though many in the majority Singhalese population are frustrated with delays in the peace process and feel the Tamils have been given too many concessions without reciprocation, they want negotiations to work. As in other areas of past civil conflict, such as Northern Ireland, ordinary people have become used to the ways of peace after long years of fear and uncertainty. They want the process to come to a final end and the present peaceful reality made into a long-term certainty. In this respect the electors probably felt that Wickramasinghe’s United National Party (UNP) had taken the negotiations with the Tamils as far as his political authority could. Impatient for a final closure, many of them have turned to Mrs. Kumaratunga’s UPFA with its harder political line in the hope that it can persuade the Tamils to agree to a final settlement. There have, however, been other factors at play. Wickramasinghe has not been a particularly popular leader and his economic reforms have been widely unpopular. Though inflation has been reduced, cuts in government programs coupled with a tax amnesty designed to reinvigorate fiscal revenues have led to accusations of cronyism. These elections were forced on him two years into his government after the president fired three of his ministers.
Nevertheless, Mr. Wickramasinghe has achieved more than any previous government in bringing peace within the grasp of all Sri Lankans. It must be hoped that he will not allow the deep enmity between himself and President Kumaratunga to undo this achievement. The new government has not been given a mandate to go back on the peace deal with the Tamil community. It has rather been asked to finish the work. Mr. Wickramasinghe and the UNP would do well now to support it in this endeavor.
